Counterbalance to Intel’s Dominance
To help counterbalance Intel’s dominance in the chip industry, Toshiba has joined the semiconductor fab alliance led by IBM and consisting of other members such as Samsung, AMD, and Freescale. “The Tokyo-based company is the seventh company to join the alliance”.
As transistors get smaller, the processes on which they are manufactured get more expensive. Not only do the fabs themselves cost billions, but the process technologies also cost billions to develop, leading companies to consolidate. Hence the IBM-led alliance.
Intel claims to have a two-year lead on the competition in process manufacturing. While the competition may deny that the lead is this large, by adding Toshiba’s resources to the alliance, the gap could narrow.
IBM appears to have only been slightly behind Intel in announcing the high-k/metal gate (HKMG) process in January.
IBM’s HKMG process is different in that it employs a traditional gate-first approach in that the gate stack is built before the source and drain.
Intel on the other hand employs a gate-last technique in which the source and drain are built first, then the gate stack.